It's About Damn Time
by GatesKeeper
Summary: [Destiel One-Shot] Sam has taken to timing his daily activities, which Dean thinks is incredibly stupid. But what happens when Sam turns the tables and starts timing his brother instead?


"What the hell are you up to now, Sammy?" Dean questions, scrolling down the spreadsheet on his laptop. Sam swats his hands away.

"I'm timing myself," he mutters, trying and failing to meet his brother's gaze without any embarrassment.

"Timing yourself?" Dean repeats, cocking an eyebrow.

"I'm just trying to see how I spend my day. Figure out if there are ways to be more productive," Sam grumbles, unwilling to admit the cute girl he met at the bookstore had said it was something she and her friends were doing. He glances down at his watch and notes that he spent the last hour and 12 minutes jogging around the bunker, which is 14 minutes more than yesterday.

"Just when I think you can't get more into the hippy, dippy health shit," Dean rolls his eyes before he promptly leaves him alone in the bunker's kitchen. Sam flips his middle finger at his brother's turned back. He doesn't understand the older Winchester's stubborn need to criticize self-improvement just for the sake of keeping up his rebel-without-a-cause image.

Really, he thinks, heading in the direction of the showers to get rid of his sweat-stink, I should be timing Dean's activities. Show him just how many hours a week he devotes to Scooby-Doo.

He pauses mid-step.

It's not the stupidest idea he's ever come up with. After all, his brother is pushing 40. Eventually, someone would have to get through to him that eating nothing but burgers, onion rings, and pie while not exercising except for hunts was bad for him. Maybe, just maybe, if the older Winchester had the evidence laid out in front of him, it would provide him with the jolt he needed.

But how? It's not like Dean would appreciate Sam tailing him for the next seven days—nor would be inclined to carry out his normal routine if he was around all the time. Re-routing himself to the library, he decides to look over some of Charlie's old notes about surveillance equipment.

/

Sam finds himself weirdly fascinated by the results from his Dean study. It is only Thursday and his brother has spent over six hours just taking care of the Impala—giving her an oil change and a wax and vacuuming the interior. He has spent four hours and 43 minutes in one afternoon watching a Dr. Sexy marathon—only to stop abruptly when Sam had walked into the room. And the youngest Winchester didn't have cameras set up in his bedroom or the bathroom—he shuddered vaguely at the thought—so who knew how much TV he watched in there?

But the thing that surprises him the most is something that, deep down, he realizes, doesn't surprise him much at all. The fact that Dean spends pretty much an hour every morning making breakfast for the family—including making special oatmeal for Sam. That he takes time teaching Jack how to play poker one afternoon, teaching him how to shoot in another.

And then there is Cas. Cas who Dean pointedly did not turn off his Dr. Sexy marathon for. Instead, he nodded his head in agreement when the angel seemingly asked to join him. (Sam hadn't wanted to invade on anyone's privacy too much, so the video feed didn't contain any audio.) Cas who Dean had, in turn, watched cat videos with, their heads close together as they leaned over a phone. Cas who his brother had given a plant to upon his return from the grocery store, prompting the seraph to give a rare, shy smile as he tucked it into his chest.

Sam fast-forwards through empty footage of this afternoon, waiting for Dean's arrival. He plays it normally just as soon as his brother enters the kitchen, apparently looking for something to eat, when Cas appears behind him. His brother turns, catching the angel's eyes and holding them. Sam can tell that they don't speak. But they must be saying something with that look that just keeps going and going and going.

He looks down at the stopwatch he had turned on the moment their gazes met. By the time the two in the video looked away, four minutes and nine seconds had passed, which brought the grand total for the week up to—he double-checked the math—three hours and 32 minutes. Of staring at each-other.

Those absolute idiots.

And the thing is—he still isn't sure, after all these years, if they know. If they know how often they let the entire rest of the world fade out because they are too focused on each other. If they know that this wasn't a normal thing to do between friends—even really close ones. That it had nothing to do with Cas being an angel and knowing nothing about personal space because he sure as heck had never stared into Sam's eyes like. For that matter, Cas had never had a problem keeping an acceptable distance from him either.

Cas got close to Dean because he wanted to be close to Dean, because he was drawn into Dean's orbit—and no matter how much his brother put on a show of not wanting him there, he always waited a few seconds or minutes too long before mentioning anything for that to be the truth. That and the fact that two days ago, Dean spent eleven minutes just watching Cas in the low light of the library like what he was seeing was a privilege.

The question now becomes…what is Sam going to do about it?

/

In the next couple of months, he "accidentally" hits them both with a truth spell, locks them in rooms together while in the midst of a prank war with his brother, and even finds a case that requires them to go undercover as a married couple, which Dean griped about immensely. The day they come back from ganking Colorado's homophobic ghost, the two of them look at each-other sideways more than usual, but, otherwise, act the same as always—and Sam feels like pulling out his hair in frustration. Only not really because his hair is his trademark.

He thinks, maybe, he should just tell them about the timing thing—except this is his emotionally-constipated brother who will see it as an attack of some kind and retreat even farther behind his wall of denial, he's sure.

Which is why he is shocked when he stumbles into the kitchen around 2 AM that night for a snack and finds Dean boxing the angel against the counter with arms on either side of him, lips locked on Cas's smiling ones. For a second, Sam's mind goes completely blank—and then the realization of what is going on hits him like a Hellhound.

"Dean," Cas murmurs, breaking the kiss, prompting his brother to turn around to face Sam, his cheeks blown red with a blush. Dean's hand instantly comes to scrub the back of his neck, clearly nervous, as he opens his mouth to explain himself.

Sam beats him to it, a grin stealing over his features. "It's about damn time!" he says, before grabbing an apple out of the fruit bowl and leaving.


End file.
